Eldering Series #4: A Cross-Generation Chat on Money, Culture, and Affection

Akaya Windwood

Akaya Windwood facilitates transformation. She advises, trains, and consults on how change happens individually, organizationally, and societally. She is on faculty for the Just Economy Institute, is founder of the New Universal, which centers human wisdom in the wisdom of brown womxn, and is Lead Advisor at Third Act. Akaya was President of Rockwood Leadership Institute for many years, and directs the Thriving Roots Fund, which supports young womxn’s finance and philanthropic learning and leadership based in generosity and interconnectedness.

Leena Barakat

Leena Barakat is Palestinian-American leader, activist, and champion of social and racial justice, Leena Barakat is the President and CEO of Women Donors Network (WDN) and its 501(c)(4) sister organization, WDN Action.

For over a decade, Leena has worked across the grassroots, philanthropic, and private/tech sectors to advance organizational impact at the intersection of systems change and business development across the three sectors. She began her career as a grassroots activist and movement builder, organizing across a range of issues that included human rights, immigration, racial equity, climate justice, labor rights, and LGBTQIA+. Barakat gained national recognition and won awards as a movement leader who advised college students across universities nationwide.

She later served as the first Head of Business Development at Visualizing Impact, a data-visualization firm for social causes, where she helped to scale and internationalize their business model. From there, Barakat joined Tides, a global philanthropic partner, and nonprofit accelerator working at the nexus of funders, change makers, and policy to accelerate the pace of social change. During her seven-year tenure at Tides, Barakat more than doubled the organization’s portfolio of clients and was instrumental in leading the strategic growth of Tides’ assets from $189 million to $1.5 billion as their Director of Strategic Partnerships. 

Passionate about merging her interests in grassroots and donor organizing, Barakat joined WDN as an active member in 2015. She was named to the Board of Directors in 2017, and a year later was elevated to the Board’s Executive Committee, where she eventually became Vice Chair. In 2020, Leena joined the board of the Donors of Color Network, where she supports the growth of BIPOC donor organizers in advancing racial equity, political power, and justice. 

She earned her Master’s Degree in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John’s University in New York. She completed her certification in Advance Project Management from Stanford University and holds a B.A. in International Studies from the University of California San Diego. She is home-based in the Los Angeles area with her two children and Bernedoodle puppy. 

Marlena Sonn

Marlena Sonn, CFP(r), is an activist working at the intersection of finance and philanthropy, with a special focus on wealth redistribution to help fund climate reparations. Marlena now serves as the Director of Finance and Investments for Solidaire, a network of donor organizers mobilizing critical resources to the frontlines of racial, gender and climate justice. She leads Solidaire’s Integrated Capital strategies, collaborating with members, Board, staff, and movement partners to build community wealth via reparative, non-extractive investments. Marlena also provides strategic development and management of Solidaire’s financial and budgetary goals, as outlined in their Theory of Liberation.

A veteran finance professional with 16 years of experience, she founded Amazonia Wealth Management, a New York City-based financial planning firm. Specialized in working with progressive, Ultra High Net Worth millennials, women, and family offices, Marlena provided the leadership in decarbonizing over $1Billion in investments, flanking the movement demands from Standing Rock and the Divest/Invest campaign. She is proud of creating some of the most stringent environmental screens for publicly traded portfolios available, by not only excluding oil and gas companies, but also the major banks that finance climate destruction. In 2015, she was a recipient of the etsy.org Regenerative Entrepreneur fellowship, which supported her work piloting the first drawdown/GHG-negative portfolios offered to individual investors.

Marlena is a widely cited expert on personal financial planning, having been featured on PBS’s Nightly Business Report, Crain’s, and guest lectures at institutions including New York University, New School of Social Research, SOCAP, and the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US-SIF).

Marlena is most well known for her courageous lawsuit which blew the cover off a massive tax evasion scheme perpetrated for decades by members of the Getty family. According to her lawsuit, and chronicled recently in the New Yorker, Marlena blew the whistle on a scheme that evaded an estimated $300 Million in taxes owed to the people of California.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, and the forthcoming The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.